Love-Hate Relationships

Nearly every relationship carries the potential to swing between love and hate. Spend your hours judging someone and you leave yourself almost no room to accept them. People take hard criticism badly, and that reaction is predictable. Often the person needling you just wants a response of some kind. The question is how they go about it: do they lift you up to get it, or knock you down?

Every minute poured into criticizing and managing other people is a minute you're not spending enjoying them. Little kids soak up affection from the people around them without a second thought. At what age does that warmth start to dry up? Picture being asked why you can't keep your kids in line, then turning around and coming down hard on the children rather than on the adult who complained. It's a strange trade. Whose opinion matters more to you, the bystander's or your own child's?

This isn't an argument for letting kids walk all over you. But the younger a child is, the simpler and cleaner their intentions tend to be. Think about the times you've made a child feel like a criminal, maybe on a day when the real source of your stress had nothing to do with them. Piling on more negativity only deepens the hole. If someone was content right up until the moment you cut them down, how do you imagine they feel once you're done?

There's an old idea that indifference cuts deeper than hate. When you stop caring enough to offer a single word, good or bad, that person has effectively vanished from your field of concern. Consider how isolated and unwanted a person has to feel before suicide starts to look like an option.

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